Normally, the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining, it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

Alter the entries as follows ... Control-click on the line to get the menu to 'toggle' or 'modify' as the entry requires:

Set "network.http.pipeliningâ€? to "trueâ€?

Set "network.http.proxy.pipeliningâ€? to "trueâ€?

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequestsâ€? to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

Lastly, control-click anywhere and select New -> Integer. Name it nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set its value to 0. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you're using a broadband connection, you'll load pages MUCH faster now!

[robg adds: Before you implement these hacks, you might want to read Asa Dotzler'sblog entry on the subject first. If you implement these tweaks, you may break some web pages (as pipelining is a bit experimental). You might also actually slow down page loads if you implement the initialpaint.dely change, and Asa explains why...]

You can also speed up Firefox (or even IE, or other browsers that support this change) by increasing the number of maximum persistent connection.

In Firefox about:config you can change network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy and network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server to a higher value to increase the number of connections that your system will use to download images (I use 10 - but be advised, you are 'violating' the http standard by doing this). This probably won't break as many things and pipelining does, and you will notice a significant increase in webpage loading. You will also be able to download more than 2 files at a time from a website. Please be mindful of other people's bandwidth.

Nice addition. I tried the others and noted a nice increase in performance, but adding in yours just put it through the roof. It takes like 1-2 seconds before anything shows up on the screen, but for the most part, it's the whole page, fully loaded. Much better than waiting 5-10 seconds for "most" of the page to load...

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Instead of monkeying with the main config file, you could edit your Firefox user.js file (create one if necessary) to include the lines:
user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 30);

The reason that firefox is not more 'mac like' is that the philosophy driving firefox is a unified code base. This means one set of source files that compiles to all operating systems. It is because of this philosophy that it is difficult to use the usual cocoa interface we all know and love.

take a look at this if you don't like the widgets
http://homepage.mac.com/amake/software/firefoxy.html
also there are g4 optimized versions here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=149532&highlight=optimized+g4
and
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=160902&highlight=optimized+g4